The four numbers to get from your accountant this week

You can't grow profit you can't see. And most owners can't see it, because the numbers live in a tax return once a year instead of on a page every month.

Your accountant already has most of what you need. You just have to ask for it in a form you can use.

The four numbers

1. Monthly revenue, expenses and profit for the last 12 to 24 months. Not the yearly total. Month by month. That's where you see your slow season, your best months and the month the costs crept up.

2. Average job size and profit by service. A busy service isn't always a profitable one. When you split it out, you usually find one line of work carrying the business and another one quietly draining it.

3. Close rate on estimates. How many estimates turned into jobs. Your accountant may not track this one, so pull it from your software or your calendar. It tells you whether you have a lead problem or a sales problem.

4. Payroll by month. So you know what a slow month really costs you. That one number tells you how much cash you need set aside before the slow season starts.

Ask one more question

Is the paperwork in order? Clean books, taxes filed, licenses current, insurance current, contracts in a folder. A buyer or a lender will ask for all of it, and it's a lot easier to fix on your schedule than on theirs.

What to do with them

Put the four numbers on one page. Then look for three things:

• Your slowest months. What do they cost you, and how much cash do you need on hand to get through them?
• Your best service. Which one has the highest profit per job? That's where your marketing money should go first.
• Your biggest leak. A low close rate, a service that loses money, or payroll that doesn't drop when the work does.

Then make it monthly

Getting the numbers once is a start. Getting them every month is a business. Ask your accountant to reconcile your books every month, in standard categories, and send you the same one page summary.

That's the first step in the seven steps to grow in our free playbook. The second step is tracking where every lead and dollar comes from. Here's how to trace every job back to the dollar that brought it.

Not sure where your business stands yet? Our free Growth Ladder assessment takes about four minutes.

Written by Coach AKFounder of Momentum. Former Executive Sales Coach Lead at Google.